Stanford football: Circle the game dates in pencil, ticket holders

To the chagrin of some Stanford and San Jose State fans, their football season opener at Stanford Stadium has been moved from Saturday, Sep. 1, to the night before at 7 o’clock. The move was made to accommodate the Pac-12 Network. The network’s arrival means ticket holders are going to have to be even more flexible than they were before.

Stanford’s second game, at home against Duke on Saturday, Sep. 8, will start at 7:30 p.m. The times for the early games for the Cardinal and for the Cal Bears were reported by John Crumpacker in Friday’s Chronicle.

So far, we only know about the Pac-12 Network’s selections for the first three weeks of the season. Season ticket holders are used to being jerked around because TV networks can wait until 12 days — or sometimes even six — before a game to determine an optimum kickoff time for the network’s needs. With the arrival of the Pac-12 Network, some Saturday games will be moved to Fridays or perhaps — like several Pac-12 games already booked on ESPN — to Thursdays.

Good luck planning that tailgate party, or inviting people from out of town to the game. The Pac-12 Network no doubt will make the member schools a lot of money and shine a spotlight on sports that normally lack visibility; it will also contribute to the loose-leaf nature of football schedules.

Besides ticket holders, the other losers in all this are high school football programs. When the Pac-12 Network schedules games on Friday nights, there will be conflicts with prep games in the local area. Sure, this schedule-conflict train left the station a long time ago, but it needs to be pointed out that Friday used to be the province of high schools while Saturday used to belong to colleges and Sunday to the NFL. The NFL generally has honored that relationship. The colleges? Not so much. There was too much TV money to be grabbed.